This work aims at evaluating in practical situations the capability of the mesh refinement technique based on the multiresolution adaptive method coupled with high resolution spatial and temporal approximations, to recover elementary physical mechanisms by achieving gains in both CPU time and memory use compared to single grid computations. We first present a summary of the multiresolution procedure. We then describe MR algorithms. Finally, the evaluation of the method is presented on several well known numerical test cases in 1D and multi-D configurations.